Hotel Chatbots: Why & How To Create A Bot For Your Hotel- Trilyo

Let’s cut to the chase and start with, why a hotel needs chatbot? Competition in the hospitality niche is ever increasing and to stay ahead of the curve all the hoteliers are devising some strategies and working on it to execute it properly so that their hotel bookings and revenue might increase. One surefire way to achieve this is- chatbots. One of the best ways a millennial traveler can utilize a chatbot is that they can hassle-freely manage his/her own bookings without needing to wait on the line for the next available representative, which if you ask us we’d say that’s pretty good! Also, a chatbot stays active for 24*7 and is able to quickly respond to all the real-time queries of a guest.

These conversational bots are lovingly known as chatbots. When it comes to customer experience, they are an effective tool for a hotel because with the help of these bots, a guest can engage with the hotel effortlessly and many small issues can be solved easily without wasting any effort or time; that’s what a customer always demands from you.

Chatbots can make the customer experience personal without the cost of hiring any human and you can employ your staff for effective human-touch whenever required. With chatbots, you can retarget your guests too! How? Just implement a chatbot with an inbuilt CRM and engage your customers on digital platforms like- social media, emails, and SMS; tell them about your latest services, offers and other relatable information. Now is the time to see why and how to create chatbot for a hotel; but first things first, let us see:

Why a hotel needs a chatbot and what are its superpowers?

Custom-tailored recommendations to travelers: Chatbots are ideal for customer centric-oriented businesses and destinations. The best part- they can serve as 24/7 front-end customer care specialists and they are capable of totally transforming visitor servicing in destinations after hours. Frequently asked questions and inquiries can be answered any time of the day or night, including when travelers are arriving at a hotel and the visitor information centre / welcome centre is closed. With chatbots, the check-in/out is a piece of cake because you don’t have to wait for the staff to respond to your query. Also, chatbots can render the guests all types of hyper-personalized recommendations based on your behavior and preference thereby promoting relationship management.

Enhance booking experience of guests: Much of the staff’s precious time and manpower is consumed in following up with the guest’s arrival and suggesting amenities like on-site car rental, spa and salon treatments, making arrangements for special occasions — be it via calls or even automated emails, which we feel and believe can be hectic at times! Wouldn’t you rather invest that valuable time elsewhere? Obviously yes, right? Here is where you can give way to automation in your hotel business. Let chatbots take care of sending automated offers and deals and perform follow ups with your customers. What’s more — guests can now check-in to their hotel room prior to their arrival at the hotel with a small chat on their bot-equipped smartphone.

Digital concierge service: Using a chatbot for room service and meal orders is much more efficient than having a guest calling the kitchen! Without wasting a single moment a chatbot can provide photos of the menus, enabling the guests to click and order instantly. With proper integration into the hotel’s system, a chatbot can provide the guest updates on how long will they have to wait before meal arrives and what the bill of the order was. A guest can also demand a fresh blanket or a pair of towel over chatbots; the query will go to the respective department and without any delay, the guest will get what he/she needs or demands at the time.

Boost hotel revenue: The hotel industry is known for paying big bucks for the traffic they generate mainly through paid ads and promotions. The chatbots make sure that those bucks are not wasted by engaging the traffic that comes into your website and ultimately reducing bounce. What’s better? Chatbots can be used as a reservation channel to get direct booking. Be it on the hotel’s website or Facebook Messenger, chatbots can be integrated anywhere and guess what! Nobody needs to manage this particular platform as the chatbot takes care of the entire process. With chatbots, the bounce rate of your website will decrease and the guests will feel more engaged and loyal towards your brand than before.

Tout-free upselling and cross-selling services: Chatbots are much too prior to the humans as they can certainly cross-sell or upsell your services! For instance, a guest finds your hotel after an extended journey in airfare, here, the chatbot can send tips to the visitor about your cafe or spa and can certainly indulge or lure them with discounts and offers. Because chatbots are run by machine learning algorithms that optimize and customize messages appropriately as they converse, the client interaction is available to be helpful and useful, resulting in up-sell and cross-sell alteration, somewhat than being viewed as touting.

Last, however, not minimal, chatbots may take your visitor experience to a complete new level by revamping your existing brand commitment and relevance. How? As we realize that guests always want something new and interesting from you, it is your obligation to provide them some mind-boggling features and services that can make your friends always get back to you to get more detailed! The 'chatbots' can create magical-moments here by greeting with the labels and anticipating their inquiries and dealing with it proactively without requesting or approaching.

Advantages of utilizing chatbot in hotels

Staffless hotels: For a staffless hotel, chatbots are a must! These bots are more commonly known as chat-based solutions is an interesting way to engage with your customers, because they respond fast! Also, they are smart, since they are built with the latest AI norms, like- Natural-Language Processing. Chatbots and voice based solutions understand your query & preferences and render proper solutions in seconds. How? The chatbot learns automatically, without any human help; the more the conversation, the better it understands your guests.

Last, but not the least, with staffless hotels, a hotelier can save loads of money and can utilize it elsewhere, for example, on providing better services and amenities and employing technology in the hotel to make the guests happy. With all the money saved by cutting all the intermediaries in between, a hotel can utilize IoT and VR in the business and make the hotel more brand relevant to attract more millennial travelers.

Money saver: If you are a business owner you are bound have a lot of employees who need to be paid for the work they do. And these expenses just keep adding up as business grows. Chatbots are a one time investment which helps businesses reduce down on staff required. You could integrate a customer support chatbot in your business to cater to simple queries of customers and pass on only the complex queries to customer support agents.

Round-the-clock availability: Now comes the most interesting part! I’m sure most of you have experienced listening to the boring music playing while you’re kept on hold by a customer care agent. On an average people spend 7 minutes until they are assigned to an agent. Gone are the days of waiting for the next available operative. Bots are replacing live chat and other forms of contact such as emails and phone calls.

Since chat bots are basically virtual robots they never get tired and continue to obey your command. They will continue to operate every day throughout the year without requiring to take a break. This improves your customer satisfaction and helps you rank highly in your sector.

Amazing guest engagement: Most businesses these days have a web presence. But with being on the internet, boundaries of day and night, availability and unavailability have changed, so have user expectations. This is probably the biggest reason to use them. Bots give the user an interactive experience. It makes customers feel they are working with someone to help resolve their issue. If done right, bots can help customers find what they are looking for and make them more likely to return.

Automate everything in hotel: Let's be honest, no one likes doing the same work again and again over brief period of time. In the case of humans, such tasks are prone to errors. Chatbots can help automate tasks which are to be done frequently and at the right time. Also, now there are numerous slack bots which automate repetitive tasks. This helps people save time and increase productivity.

How to create a chatbot for your hotel?

Now, here is the difficult part! Most of the hoteliers are unaware of the fact that they can easily build a chatbot by outsourcing it to chatbot builders. The best part is that you won’t have to do anything; the product will be delivered to your doorstep (not literally!) and you’ll just have to deploy it on your website, that’s it!

Some of the best chatbot building companies:

1. Bebot from Bespoke: Bebot is one of the first ever chatbots that is entirely dedicated to the hospitality industry. Bebot is an AI-powered chatbot that acts as a hotel concierge. It is designed to empower guests through instant, real-time assistance such as exclusive recommendations for both popular and little-known sights in the area, answering questions only hotel staff would know about, or even making restaurant bookings.

Bebot brings 5 star hospitality to guests and business efficiency to the organization. Bebot is able to answer numerous travel related queries and property specific questions, like:

Directions

Activity bookings

Hotel and restaurant bookings

Hotel facility questions

Request to post reviews

Accumulated guest feedback

2. Surbo: Most of the hotel aggregators across the globe have built beautiful interfaces (not so beautiful in some cases) to present to their guest/consumers, but these interfaces only facilitate the discovery and booking part of the business and leave the consumers in a tiff when it comes to other facets. This would mean that a customer would typically have to call up customer support and have his queries resolved. This not only makes it troublesome for the consumer but also for the brand since they have the added overheads of maintaining a team for responding to consumer queries. Now all these can be solved with a single chatbot named- Surbo

Surbo can assist you in:

Hotel bookings

Guest feedback

Live notifications

Set reminders

Frequently asked questions

Search, Book, and cancel a flight

Web check-in

Track refund status

Now, last but not the least:

3. Trilyo: For hoteliers who struggle to engage with millennial travelers, Trilyo provides next generation customer experience with AI-driven voice & chat based solutions. Trilyo always thrive to exceed the expectations of millennial travelers by rendering hyper-personalized recommendations based on the guests’ priority.

Trilyo helps you to provide the next generation customer experience with AI-driven Voice & Chat based solutions that drive better loyalty towards your business. The best thing about chatbots is that unlike humans, the chatbot never gets exhausted. It works seamlessly; the guests will just need an internet connection, that’s it. It connects brands with customers on everyday messaging platforms and understands whichever language they speak in.

The best part of the chatbot developed by Trilyo is that it is super-easy to deploy it on your website. You’ll just have to paste the code on your website and voila! Your bot is ready to perform and engage with the guests. The Trilyo bot is built on the latest NLP standards and can answer all real-time queries of the guest within seconds. It is also capable of rendering hyper-personalized recommendations as per the guests’ demands and preference.

So, now you know each and everything about chatbots what you should have known earlier! It’s not too late! Pick a slot & book a demo with us and our team will reach out to you within 24 working hours. Let's redefine guest experience and grow your business with AI-backed chatbots and voice-based solutions.

About Author

Ankur Chowdhury

A passionate writer who loves to develop meaningful and informative content with deep research and analysis. I have been a blogger and a writer for the past 3.5 years. I consider this as my passion and I really love it. Daily, I spend hours of time in writing. Blogging helps to enhance my knowledge in various fields. I am a full-time blogger at Trilyo.